Inside the Rzhev Meatginder. Gennadiy Fedorovich Rusakov

village, in the same Tupitsino (stupidsino), 3.5 km from Egor’evskoe. All our relatives on my mother’s side lived there. At the end of the week, if I’m not mistaken, on Thursday, a German officer appeared in class. He spoke well in Russian and explained to the old teacher Elizaveta Kapitonovna (my mother also studied with her) that now she needed to conduct lessons in a new way. He will try to monitor the correct training of students. Students should know: The Soviets and Stalin are bad. Germany and Hitler are good. This was central to his rather long conversation with the teacher.

      When the German left, the teacher said: “I don’t know how and what can happen later, but I think you don’t need to come to school anymore.” That’s how our school year ended.

      About three days after class cancellations, my sister and I decided to throw ourselves a party. I think it was a Sunday, again there were no adults in the village, as I said, they cleaned the bread. And we: me, my sister and brother were at home and drinking tea. A samovar was boiling on the table, and under the table was a small bag of sugar. I took it out of the cache, it was our military reserve.

      When one of the neighboring children shouted on the street: “Germans!”, I, remembering what happened on the first appearance of them in our village, climbed under the table to hide this bag back in the cache. I hurried, pushed the table and knocked over the boiling samovar on myself. The burn was terrible, probably half of my skin came off, and I was in bed for a long time. Naturally, there was no hospital in the village, my mother treated me – she lubricated the burns with the protein of raw eggs – so told my great-grandmother on my father,” she was considered a medicine woman in the village. All the villagers were treated by her.

      The nearest medical facility was 12 kilometers away. I recovered slowly. While in our village the fascists were only raids – chickens were still walking through the streets and all other peasant animals were still intact.

      But when the garrison was stationed in October, the chickens, the “eggs”, and other village animals very quickly ran out. But my mother, in advance, hid a number of testicles in different places and continued my treatment, taking out one, two pieces from the caches. At that time, there was no place for us in the house, the Nazis already lived in the living rooms, and we huddled in the kitchen. A gypsy woman with her children was taken somewhere.

      Chapter 5. The year is 1941. Boots

      In November, when the cold weather came, orders were posted in the village – to hand over warm clothes and shoes to the German command. Particular attention was paid to boots and fur coats, for hiding them – shooting. Houses were searched. But the inhabitants did not want to give what in such a harsh winter was necessary for themselves or their loved ones, husbands, sons and fathers who went to war, so they hid everything in some hiding places, often risking their lives.

      I remember how my mother and I dragged my father’s boots and his two unmarried brothers, from one basement, where the boots were hidden, to another, in which the search had already passed. This allowed the installation of a basement in the house. I had already started walking by this time.

      Even earlier, when the Nazis only visited the village, but already searched the houses and took away everything that they thought were valuable, my mother buried a bicycle, a sewing machine and a wooden barrel of salted pork in the garden. My mother sheathed a suitcase with fabrics with burlap and tied it to a children’s sled, it turned out to be a seat, that is, like a natural belonging to a sled. So they stood in the canopy until the very end of the village’s existence.

      It also became clear why the German officer was interested in our rivers on his first visit. Women of the surrounding villages, including ours, began to be driven to dig trenches on the western, that is, opposite banks of our rivers. Trenching continued until the onset of frost in November. Therefore, when the Nazis were poured in full near Moscow, they retreated to the fortifications prepared in advance, and our village became the front line.

      Chapter 6. The year is 1942. Between fronts. I’m 8 years old

      In the early twenties (21 or 22) of January, all those able to hold a shovel in their hands were driven out to clear the roads. There was a lot of snow, raked all the way to the ground. Huge ramparts formed along the road, as we worked from dawn to dusk for several days. When this huge snow trench was finished, equipment, cars, tanks, guns went through it, all this was crossed through Sukromlya to the west bank.

      The troops marched for about a day, the infantry went for the equipment, in an organized manner, in tight formations. Along the entire road, on both sides, apparently along its entire length, there were cover posts: a trench in the snow with a machine gun and three soldiers, and so it was in front of our house. Two weeks earlier, nervousness was felt in the behavior of the fascists, all the villagers, even children, understood that something terrible and unpredictable was approaching and they went to bed without undressing in order to be ready for anything at any time.

      Around midnight, on January 26, we heard the sound of breaking glass and saw flames of flamethrowers through broken windows. It was soldiers in black uniforms who set fire to houses. The night was very cold. From the conversations of adults, I remember that it was more than 40 degrees below zero. My mother sat my younger brother on the same suitcase, wrapping it in all the warm clothes that could only be found, and tied it to a sled, So he sat on a sled near a burning house.

      Our entire family and a few neighbors gathered outside my great-grandfather’s burning house, apparently because he was the only man in this corner of the village. We warmed up by this fire for two hours. During this time, one of the soldiers of that flanking cover from the river, came to warm up at the burning house and, leaving, took off his great-grandfather’s hat and boots.

      In the old man, thrown out of the burning house, the great-grandfather found an old hat – budyonovka and cotton pims, like, the way out: both the head and legs are covered. But then suddenly a patrol came, checked the flank posts, saw my grandfather’s budyonovka with a red star and took him somewhere. We thought he wouldn’t be back, but he did. He was released when, apparently, it turned out that he was 96 years old and was squandered by their own soldiers. We were very happy about his return.

      And soon after, another soldier from the flank cover came to the burning house where we were staying. He looked around and walked over to me and tried to take the hat off my head. The ribbons of the ears of my hat were tied under my chin. When he realized that he needed to untie the ribbons, he reached under my chin with his hand. Without hesitation, I involuntarily pressed my teeth into his hand and bit it to the blood. He howled in pain and hit me in the right ear with such force that I flew away from him three or four meters away. It’s good that I didn’t go in the direction of the burning house and buried my head in the snowdrift. My mother saw this when he stepped towards me again, she, without hesitation, slapped him with such a slap that he was in the same snowdrift, next to me! He did not expect this, he was frightened, jumped up and ran to where he came from, since he was unarmed. The grandmothers were worried: “He will return with a weapon and not alone, you need to hide,” they said and buried me and my mother in the snow 10—15 meters from the place where it happened.

      They were right – he came with a gun and not alone. Everyone who was by the fire was interrogated for a long time, threatened, but they pointed to the road and said that we had left. Later, the grandmothers said that these two felt the snow for a long time with bayonets, fortunately for us, not where we were buried, and then went to the machine gun nest.

      Sometime after the incident, a group of soldiers appeared in black uniforms, with the image of a human skull and crossed bones on the sleeves of overcoats. They began to drive people away from burning houses to the road, it was freed from military units, apparently everyone went through, and now they are engaged with us – the inhabitants.

      All the other events of this night are described by me in the poem “We Remember”, in which everything is true, without any